[Kirby64]

> Even something as commonplace as chewing more carelessly will result in finding seeds in your faeces.

Most people’s diets do not consist of fully intact seeds, or at very least it is not a large proportion of their calories. And any processing of said seeds would give you all the calories in them. This is a trivial example to discard, since most people do not have undigested food bits consistently in their stool (unless you constantly eat corn, then maybe).

To be clear, I never said exercise is not capable of burning calories. It clearly does, however the impact is pretty muted compared to the relatively easy task of adjusting one’s intake. For people that have to do enormous physical activity or just walk a ton, they are going to burn quite a bit more calories. But your natural expenditure individually doesn’t vary that much unless you wildly change your behavior around exercise.

[galdosdi]

And my point that I've repeated over and over, is that the benefit of exercise is far broader than just merely numerically burning calories. It is in all these other beneficial effects that it can indirectly help. Focusing solely on calories in calories out is a big mistake when improving health and/or tackling obesity.

[Kirby64]

> Focusing solely on calories in calories out is a big mistake when improving health and/or tackling obesity.

For improving health? Certainly I’d agree. You have to be quite overweight before the risk factors really catch up.

For tackling obesity? Absolutely disagree. You’re asking someone who is likely making poor choices with food and exercise to make multiple lifestyle changes. We want something that’s going to be able to adherent to the broader populous. Saying you need both exercise and dieting to lose weight is a setup for failure. The predominantly most important factor in losing weight is diet. Exercise helps you be more healthy, but doesn’t meaningfully help you lose weight.